Rachel Maddow welcomed former West Point cadet Katie Miller to her studio yesterday to discuss her reapplication and subsequent rejection from West Point. Miller left West Point last year because she said she couldn't continue to lie about her sexuality. She thought she would be able to reattend since "DADT' repeal is underway. Not so.

Obama is set to announce several shifts in key leadership posts, among them Secretary of Defense. Slate reports:

The shifts, which Obama is set to announce Thursday afternoon, are these: Leon Panetta replaces Robert Gates as secretary of defense; Gen. David Petraeus (soon to resign from the military) fills Panetta's slot as CIA director; Gen. John Allen (Petraeus' former deputy at U.S. Central Command) takes over from Petraeus as commander in Afghanistan; and Ryan Crocker, former ambassador to Iraq (and envoy to Afghanistan), takes over from Karl Eikenberry as ambassador to Kabul.

The White House responded this evening to questions about if and how the planned June 30 resignation date of Defense Secretary Robert Gates would impact the repeal of the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, with White House spokesman Shin Inouye telling Metro Weekly, "The DADT repeal act was signed into law by the President, and certification and implementation will happen whomever serves as Secretary of Defense."

Although neither the White House nor the Pentagon would answer whether either entity was planning for certification to fall to Panetta, Inouye did note, "We appreciate the service of Secretary Gates, and his leadership in achieving the passage of the Repeal Act, and for moving the certification process forward.

“Servicemembers United welcomes the expected nomination of Mr. Panetta as the next Secretary of Defense and wishes Secretary Gates all the best as he moves on to the next chapter in his life,” said Alexander Nicholson, Executive Director of Servicemembers United. “We continue to stress that it would be best for the armed forces if Secretary Gates would ensure that the task of certifying the repeal of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ is complete prior to his departure. This job began on Secretary Gates’ watch, and it is only right that the job be finished on his watch. Servicemembers United looks forward to working with Mr. Panetta to ensure a smooth transition to a post-’Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ military and to jointly supportting the gay military community moving forward.”

Rachel Maddow last night played a highly ridiculous 'DADT' repeal training video that was actually created by the military but rejected and not sanctioned for training because of "poor production and content." Easy to see why!

Putting himself in line with Republican presidential hopefuls Haley Barbour (R-MS), Tim Pawlenty (R-MN) and Mike Huckabee (R-AR), former Senator Rick Santorum told the Wonk Room's Igor Volsky in New Hampshire that he would reinstate the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy should he be elected President.

The Military’s Secret Shame

When men in the military rape other men in the ranks, no one wants to talk about it. Why the sexual assault of males in the service is finally being confronted.

Marcia Lippman / Gallery Stock

Greg Jeloudov was 35 and new to America when he decided to join the Army. Like most soldiers, he was driven by both patriotism for his adopted homeland and the pragmatic notion that the military could be a first step in a career that would enable him to provide for his new family. Instead, Jeloudov arrived at Fort Benning, Ga., for basic training in May 2009, in the middle of the economic crisis and rising xenophobia. The soldiers in his unit, responding to his Russian accent and New York City address, called him a “champagne socialist” and a “commie faggot.” He was, he told NEWSWEEK, “in the middle of the viper’s pit.” Less than two weeks after arriving on base, he was gang-raped in the barracks by men who said they were showing him who was in charge of the United States. When he reported the attack to unit commanders, he says they told him, “It must have been your fault. You must have provoked them.”

What happened to Jeloudov is a part of life in the armed forces that hardly anyone talks about: male-on-male sexual assault. In the staunchly traditional military culture, it’s an ugly secret, kept hidden by layers of personal shame and official denial. Last year nearly 50,000 male veterans screened positive for “military sexual trauma” at the Department of Veterans Affairs, up from just over 30,000 in 2003. For the victims, the experience is a special kind of hell—a soldier can’t just quit his job to get away from his abusers. But now, as the Pentagon has begun to acknowledge the rampant problem of sexual violence for both genders, men are coming forward in unprecedented numbers, telling their stories and hoping that speaking up will help them, and others, put their lives back together. “We don’t like to think that our men can be victims,” says Kathleen Chard, chief of the posttraumatic-stress unit at the Cincinnati VA. “We don’t want to think that it could happen to us. If a man standing in front of me who is my size, my skill level, who has been raped—what does that mean about me? I can be raped, too.”

In fact, it is the high victimization rate of female soldiers—women in the armed forces are now more likely to be assaulted by a fellow soldier than killed in combat—that has helped cast light on men assaulting other men. For most of military history, there was neither a system nor language in place to deal with incidents of soldier-on-soldier sexual assault. It wasn’t until 1992 that the Defense Department even acknowledged such incidents as an offense, and initially only female victims were recognized. But last year more than 110 men made confidential reports of sexual assault by other men, nearly three times as many as in 2007. The real number of victims is surely much higher. Even among civilians, sexual assault is a vastly underreported crime. In the military the silence is nearly complete. By the Pentagon’s own estimate, figures for assaults on women likely represent less than 20 percent of actual incidents. Another study released in March found that just one in 15 men in the Air Force would report being sexually assaulted, compared with one in five women.

While many might assume the perpetrators of such assaults are closeted gay soldiers, military experts and outside researchers say assailants usually are heterosexual. Like in prisons and other predominantly male environments, male-on-male assault in the military, experts say, is motivated not by homosexuality, but power, intimidation, and domination. Assault victims, both male and female, are typically young and low-ranking; they are targeted for their vulnerability. Often, in male-on-male cases, assailants go after those they assume are gay, even if they are not. “One of the reasons people commit sexual assault is to put people in their place, to drive them out,” says Mic Hunter, author ofHonor Betrayed: Sexual Abuse in America’s Military. “Sexual assault isn’t about sex, it’s about violence.”

According to Hunter and others, the repeal of the military’s policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell” might actually help the institution address the issue. Under that rule, being gay meant being fundamentally unfit to serve; it meant you didn’t belong. It also meant that victims were even more reluctant to report their attacks. “I wouldn’t say that the repeal is going to make it safe,” says Aaron Belkin, director of the Palm Center, a think tank on gays in the military. “But male victims will be a little bit less reluctant to report their assaults.” Belkin notes that it’s not just the military that avoids the issue: even gay-rights organizations are wary of it. “We don’t like to talk about it because it makes rape look like a gay issue,” Belkin says. “The military doesn’t want to talk about it because, as embarrassing as male-female rape is [from their perspective], this is even worse. The very fact that there’s male-on-male rape in the military means that there are warriors who aren’t strong enough to fight back.”

Blake Stephens, now 29, joined the Army in January 2001, just seven months after graduating from high school. The verbal and physical attacks started quickly, he says, and came from virtually every level of the chain of command. In one of the worst incidents, a group of men tackled him, shoved a soda bottle into his rectum, and threw him backward off an elevated platform onto the hood of a car. When he reported the incident, Stephens says, his platoon sergeant told him, “You’re the problem. You’re the reason this is happening,” and refused to take action. “You just feel trapped,” he says. “They basically tell you you’re going to have to keep working with these people day after day, night after night. You don’t have a choice.” His assailants told him that once deployed to Iraq, they would shoot him in the head. “They told me they were going to have sex with me all the time when we were there,” he says.

Stephens twice attempted suicide. His marriage fell apart. He became paranoid and explosive. In June 2003 his mother wrote a letter to Sen. Barbara Boxer, detailing her son’s “continued humiliation.” “Congressional inquiries have been know [sic] to jeopardize a soldier’s rank and standing,” Boxer’s office responded. “There is no way for our office to administratively protect your son’s military standing once a congressional examination is in progress.” The following August, Stephens was discharged for his “physical condition.”

Fear of a ruined career is a major factor preventing victims from coming forward. In 2010 the Pentagon anonymously surveyed active-duty soldiers who had been sexually assaulted about why they declined to report their attacks. Almost half the responding men said they kept silent because they didn’t want anyone to know, a third said they didn’t think anything would be done, and almost 30 percent said they were afraid of retaliation or reprisals.

In recent years the Pentagon has tried to show that it takes the issue seriously, defining sexual assault in broad terms as a “spectrum of offenses from rape to nonconsensual sodomy to wrongful sexual contact, as well as attempts to commit these offenses.” In 2005 it established a special unit, the Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office, and provided training for 1,200 officers to handle incident reports. Yet critics believe that the Pentagon has moved too slowly and that military procedures for prosecuting such crimes are far less effective than civilian laws. In February, Jeloudov and 16 other former and active-duty service members filed a class-action lawsuit against Defense Secretary Robert Gates and his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, charging they “ran institutions in which perpetrators were promoted…and Plaintiffs and other victims were openly subjected to retaliation.”

Because reports of such crimes happen outside the reach of police and are handled by a unit’s commanding officer, according to the Pentagon’s own figures, last year just 15 percent of reported cases were actually prosecuted. “There’s no investigatory training. They don’t tell you to look for evidence,” says Greg Jacob, who retired as a captain after 10 years in the Marines and is now policy director for the Service Women’s Action Network. “Military justice imbued me with the ability to be judge and jury. Honestly, I had no idea what to do.” Commanders often decline to take any action at all. “I have nothing bad to say about the military. There’s sick bastards in all walks of life,” says Michael F. Matthews, who was raped during basic training in 1972 but didn’t tell anyone until 30 years later. “I get angry with the military system sometimes, but I understand it. What happens is on small levels. You take [a complaint] to your commanding officer. He doesn’t want that black eye. He wants the promotion. So he tries to keep it under the carpet.”

But dismissing such brutality can produce more victims. Twenty-two years ago, Jamey Michael Harding, then a baby-faced 17-year-old enlistee, says he was raped repeatedly by a drill sergeant at basic training. He attempted to report his assault, but his complaint was ignored, he says. The sergeant stayed in the armed forces, ultimately retiring as a decorated officer. Almost two decades later, the man whom Harding says raped him was arrested for raping multiple underage cadets at a junior ROTC program. He pleaded guilty to lewd and lascivious acts on a child and is now in prison. Harding, meanwhile, struggles with an array of mental-health issues he says stem from his attacks. “Many men and women will experience symptoms like PTSD or depression after experiencing sexual assault. But the experience seems even more detrimental for men’s mental health,” says Amy Street, a psychologist with the Boston VA hospital who has worked with both male and female survivors. “The way I make sense of that is that women, for better or worse, live their lives with this idea that they might experience sexual assault at some point. There are public models of how to recover from rape. Men don’t have any expectation that this might happen to them. It’s very difficult to figure out how those experiences fit into your sense of self as a man.”

Servicemembers United, the nation's largest organization of gay and lesbian troops and veterans, announced today that the Navy has decided to halt discharge proceedings against Petty Office Stephen Jones and retain him in the Navy. Jones, who is stationed at the Naval Nuclear Power Training Command in Charleston, SC, was undergoing separation from the Navy for what his civilian lawyer and Servicemembers United strongly alleged were trumped up charges based on the command's suspicion that Jones might be gay.

"The Navy undoubtedly did the right thing in reversing its decision to discharge Petty Officer Stephen Jones," said Alexander Nicholson, Executive Director of Servicemembers United. "We strongly suspected that his command was trying to find a round about way to discharge Jones because it suspected him of being gay, and we simply were not willing to stand by and watch a new version of 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' emerge under the new label of 'unprofessional conduct.'"

Petty Officer Jones was notified by the Navy in early March that he was going to be discharged because he refused to accept a non-judicial punishment for "unprofessional conduct" after dozing off beside another male sailor while watching television. Jones retained civilian attorney Gary Myers – a former JAG officer who is one of the most experienced civilian military defense attorneys in the country – to fight his discharge. Servicemembers United worked closely with Jones and Myers to help publicize the case and persuade Navy leaders to retain Petty Officer Jones.

Nicholson added, "We wish Petty Officer Jones all the best as he now continues his pursuit of a successful and productive career in the United States Navy."

I saw an interview once of an Army veteran from the Deep South who had gone to Vietnam as a young soldier in possession of all the usual cultural prejudices that one would expect. He came back a changed man. “There’s something about being in a unit, knowing that all your lives depend on everyone doing his job,” he said. “You put your life in your buddy’s hands, and he puts his life in yours. You don’t care about what color he is.”

And as far as whether gays can make good warriors, there’s a story about Alexander the Great, who, as legend goes, was gay. His troops were horrified to learn about his lover, who accompanied him on his campaigns as he conquered most of the known world.

What upset them wasn’t that Alexander’s main squeeze was a man; it was that he was a Persian.

So the problem isn’t really gays serving in the military. The problem is with people who have a problem with gays serving in the military.

Chan Lowe oChan Lowe

Sharing porn with men since 1992.

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